Living La Vida Loca

After spending a wonderful week with our new friends, the Bombaci family, in their country home near Todi, it is abundantly clear why both Andrew and I feel so at home in Italy.   Open arms.  Our home in Seattle and now in Barcelona is often described as a place where friends and family, and friends of friends and family…and when it happens – strangers in need of company – can come and feel welcome. We have an ‘open door’ approach to life. We love meeting new people, engaging in deep and not-so-deep conversations, learning about other cultures and life perspectives, and leaving formality at the door.  It is our way.  Here in the Bombaci home, we have been made to feel the way we want others to feel when they visit with us – comfortable, well fed, and relaxed.

Eating Off the Land…Literally

The Bombaci’s farm house in rural Umbria, a village called Pian di San Martino just below the walled city of Todi, is a renovated house that Felice has worked on over many years – doing brickwork, and plumbing, painting and plastering, and together with the rest of his family, planting and tending a magnificent and abundant garden that yields fruit, vegetables and herbs that are used every day that they are staying in the house.  Both Felice and his wife, Marisa, love to cook and are very, very good at it – especially when it comes to using home grown ingredients and making traditional Italian regional dishes.  We had salads of lettuce, tomatoes and onions picked minutes before we ate.  Sautéed zucchini and eggplant using locally pressed olive oil and herbs from the backyard.  Pasta with homegrown pesto (to DIE for).  And white wine made by Felice! Oh yes, and fresh olives, lemons, and various summer fruit as well.   And tomatoes….oh my goodness…tomatoes to feed a small army!

At the end of the summer Felice and Marisa were busy doing “conserva” (canning) of kilos and kilos of the ripe tomatoes that were raining down from their garden.  Canning and bottling them in jars and any kind of glass container they could recycle.  With a basement lined with this booty, they had the basis for pasta sauce, pizza topping, sundried tomatoes, etc for the rest of the year.  The preparation, canning and sterilization process was fascinating, and exhausting to watch, but it was part of the rhythm of the time we were there.  I really enjoyed helping when I could – shucking clams for pasta vongole, making a garbanzo bean salad and including some of the farm vegetables, grating local pecorino cheese for toppings – a small contribution but it made me feel part of the gang.

The Younger Generation

The three young adults that are part of the Bombaci family have successfully carved a place in our hearts just as their parents have.  Alessandro is 22 and a medical student who wants to be a neurosurgeon.  He reminds us so much of our Ari…first child – super focused on his schooling, very athletic and likes a good challenge, inquisitive about similarities and differences between education and healthcare systems in the US and everywhere else J, and a wonderful companion and guide as we tried to learn about Italian history and culture despite a big language barrier.  He and his siblings all speak a fair amount of English, but there was a lot of translating needed for Marisa as she knows the least English of all.   Sabrina is 20 and we are sure she and Ruthie would like each other a lot.  She too is a medical student not yet sure of her focus in that arena, but she is charming, has a great sense of humor, has the powerful female moxie that will get her far in the world, and loves a good shopping day!  Then Francesco – 16 and a delightful young man…smart as all get out, affectionate, eager to please, and like our Eitan, has the teenage perspective that he knows more than his parents (but he respectfully backs off as needed).  All the kids made us feel as welcome as Felice and Marisa did – it was in a weird way a welcome filling up of my need to have that youthful energy around that I miss when we are apart from our kids.  Eitan was with us for the first part of the week and then returned to Barcelona to spend the last few days of his Spanish period with friends there – but it was clear that the camaraderie with the family brood was great while he was there.

Seeing Umbria

Along with getting a wonderful taste of life in a small village, Felice and family took us on some day trips to see some of the cities (walled and otherwise) that make up the breathtaking quality of Umbria.  We visited Todi, Orvieto, Norcia, Spoleto, Perugia, and unbelievable Assisi – each with its own special character.  We went down into a medieval well that winds meters underground in Orvieto, tasted Porchetta in Norcia, wandered the streets of Spoleto where there is an international jazz festival annually, and spent our last afternoon in Assisi – truly a highlight of our stay.

Assisi is a religious hub with magnificent churches and cathedrals, and many monasteries that welcome all comers who want to spend some meditative, introspective time in a pastoral setting beyond words.  We happened to be there on a day when a special ceremonial parade was happening that is tied to a local historical competition between three groups of soldiers/warriors (I will have to look up the exact lore) – so the pomp and pageantry was very cool with a drum corps and people dressed in medieval garb…guys with really big crossbows made it feel pretty authentic!

The Cross-Cultural Cacophony of Multi-lingual Communication

“Un pregunta!”  (Translation:  “A question!”)  was the conversation starter at virtually every meal we ate together – and there were many questions and many meals together.  Everyone in the Bombaci family had some measure of English comprehension – except Marisa.   Neither Andrew nor I spoke any Italian, and Andrew and Marisa were the only two who could communicate in French, and Marisa and I could make things pretty well understood between us in Spanish.   Hmmm…made for some interesting U.N.-like cross talk as the week got underway.  The usual pattern was for us to ask or explain something in English, one of the Bombaci’s would translate into Italian for Marisa, and if she wanted to respond she would tell Andrew in French and he would translate back to English!  As the week progressed, I actually began to catch on to some of the Italian conversation, Marisa began to catch up on basic English words and phrases, and the rest of the crew’s English improved many fold.  None of this kept any of us from charging forward with the preguntas to try to educate each other on the finer points of politics, education, healthcare, family priorities, travel aspirations, and favorite food groups, movies and books.  It was very, very funny at times – and always fun.  We did have a few of the typical misunderstandings about meaning, though.  At one point I tried to ask Felice for some toilet paper (we were out in our guest bathroom) and he thought I wanted either bath salts or a newspaper!  Hilarious.

Mi Casa es Su Casa

In all, this was one of the most relaxing and rewarding weeks we have spent so far as an expat family group.  It would have been all the more rich with all our three kids along, but even without that (and I think I can speak for Andrew as well in this instance) we feel as though we have something like an extended family in Italy now.  We all got pretty emotional at the end…we exchanged little gifts and big hugs and are really hoping that Felice and Marisa can find a way to come stay with us with their family before we leave Barcelona.  We would be so thrilled to be able to return the warmth and welcome to them – whether in Spain or in the US sometime.  I know Ari and Ruth would love our new friends, and vice versa.  The world seems to work in strange ways for us near vagabonds, so it’s possible.

And so it goes…